Tuesday night was not Drew Pomeranz finest moment in a Red Sox uniform. He was leaving his fastball up in the zone, couldn’t locate his signature curveball, and he was getting zero help from a home plate umpire who was squeezing pitchers on both teams all night long. This led to Pomeranz making it through just 2 innings and allowing 5 earned runs. It’s as safe of a bet as you can make that when Drew Pomeranz takes the hill, the Red Sox are not going to score a lot of runs. Therefore, when you allow 5 runs in the second inning, there’s no climbing out of that hole. Game over. No, the offense wasn’t great tonight. But I’m not concerned about that. When scoring 3 runs qualifies as an off night, you’re doing something right. What I want to talk about is the social media extremists who were blowing up the internet to let the world know what they thought of Drew Pomeranz.

After Pomeranz was removed from the game, I took to twitter to see what people had to say about Drew’s start. I was expecting people to say he sucked tonight and that he lost us this game. He did. However, the most popular statement I came across in these tweets was that “Drew Pomeranz is bum” or “I can’t believe we traded Espinoza for this guy. He can’t pitch in the American League”. Basically, people are pissed off and ready to run this guy out of Boston. This just isn’t right because he has been pretty much the same guy that we traded for. Coming into Tuesday, Pomeranz had averaged about 5 ⅔ innings per start in 10 starts since coming over from San Diego. In 18 starts in with the Padres, Pomeranz averaged just under 6 innings per start. As far as innings, he’s been about the same in Boston as he was in San Diego.

People will make the argument, “Look at his ERA! He had a 2.47 in San Diego! He can’t handle the American League!.” Well, no shit his ERA went up. It’s the American League. We have better hitters to go along with hitter friendly ballparks that will inflate any pitcher's ERA. Even if you want to take this out of the equation, we’ve already seen Pomeranz have a stretch in which he was able to shut down opposing American League offenses. In 6 starts in the month of August, Pomeranz had a 2.70 ERA, a .230 opponent batting average, and averaged just over 6 innings per start. During this stretch Pomeranz only allowed more than 2 ER in one outing. An outing in which he allowed 3 ER. These aren’t ace like numbers, but this is not David Price. We did not acquire Pomeranz to be our ace. We got him to be a solid back of the rotation starter, and that’s exactly what he’s been. Yes, he’ll have a bad outing every now and then. So when he has these bad outings, fans need to take a step back and appreciate that they come a lot fewer and further between than they had for Clay Buchholz and/or Joe Kelly before they were banished to the bullpen. Just because we traded our top pitching prospect for Pomeranz, that doesn’t magically make him better than he already was. He wasn’t an ace when we traded for him, he’s not an ace now. So please stop freaking out when he has a bad start.

On a much more positive note, Andrew Benintendi has been activated from the disabled list and is expected to start in Wednesday night’s game. With the continuous struggles of Xander Bogaerts, we need a more consistent hitter hitting second in the order. If Benintendi can pick up where he left off, there’s no reason that this can’t be him. If he can’t produce as he had prior to the injury, we’ll just have to leave the lineup as it is and hope that Chris Young can stay hot and Bogey can heat up.